Censorship and the Fact-foxes

American Thinker ^ | 26 Nov, 2025 | Thomas Kolbe

[MtnClimber]

The internet has become the primary battleground for free expression. With ever-expanding funding streams, the German government is building an NGO-driven censorship apparatus that quietly injects the poison of the totalitarian impulse into public discourse. Now, a group called “Liber-Net” has succeeded in illuminating this sprawling, kraken-like suppression network.

If you are an active participant in online debates -- especially if you occasionally express views critical of the government -- you’ve likely already encountered one of the countless “fact foxes.” Point to independent research on CO2’s impact on global climate that undermines the logic of the green transition, and suddenly the likelihood rises that a state-funded NGO will sic one of these “fact-checkers” on you, flag your content, accuse you of hate speech, and launch a bot-driven harassment cascade designed to dehumanize and trivialize your replies.

If this has happened to you -- congratulations. You are now part of the resistance against the state’s expanding censorship kraken.

Liber-Net and the Kraken

Just how deep the state’s covert censorship apparatus now reaches has long been difficult to assess. Censors love darkness, hidden channels, and opaque financing. But a spectacular investigative effort by “Liber-Net” -- a civil society group advocating for digital rights -- has, for the first time, shone a bright light into that darkness.

In an interview with Berliner Zeitung, Liber-Net director Andrew Lowenthal describes in detail how this multi-layered NGO ecosystem operates and the extent to which it is intertwined with state authorities.

Liber-Net identified more than 330 actors -- directly or indirectly funded with taxpayer money -- who participate in online content moderation. Their mandate: mark politically inconvenient posts, flag them as “harmful,” or suppress them entirely. They provide the operational foundation that gives life to the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s largest regulatory project

---

TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: leftism

[MtnClimber]

It seems 1984 was a few years late.

[mewzilla]

The link tax and meme ban were a preview of coming attractions....

[mewzilla]

With apologies for the source, from 2017...

Facebook establishes new censorship centre in Germany

[aspasia]

Original article from Liber-Net:

Also linked there is 60-minutes episode, Policing the internet in Germany, where hate speech, insults are a crime

It's the same-old same-old, just as Solzhenitsyn was picked up for criticizing Stalin in a letter.

[aspasia]

I sometimes wonder where that impulse comes from: to hunt after fellow human beings.

Reminds me of the short story, The Most Dangerous Game where Zaroff, he explains over dinner "that although he has been hunting animals since he was a boy, he has decided that killing big game has become boring for him."

[oldtech]

Maybe some people never went to school or what I just don’t know. They need to know that CO2 in reasonable quantities as it is now, is no danger to citizens & in fact is what makes the grass grow green. Why certain people have never learned this is a mystery to me. CO2 would have to raise to really large proportions to be any threat to mankind. To my knowledge, it has never been that high on this planet.